


Life Does Not Go On

by freshest



Category: IT - Stephen King
Genre: Bev is Richie's best friend and Eddie is his soul mate okay good bye, Beverly has an extended vision from the deadlights, Canon Divergence, Eddie dies but also not really, Fix-It, M/M, i dont make the rules i just follow them, like a lot, most of the fic is Richie POV but the very end is Bev's, richie completely loses it, same with stan, serious angst though before it gets fixed, there is a POV switch towards the end
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-18
Updated: 2019-09-18
Packaged: 2020-10-21 01:16:42
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,866
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20685092
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/freshest/pseuds/freshest
Summary: In which Beverly single-highhandedly saves the Losers from living the worst life they could have ever lived. They just don't realize it yet.Richie mourns a life time of having lost Eddie, and the Losers support him.But maybe there's some hope after all. If he just learns to be a little braver when the time matters for it.





	Life Does Not Go On

**Author's Note:**

> I deleted my Tumblr forever ago because I thought I wouldn't be using it anymore but I WAS A FOOL. Anyway I have a baby new tumblr over @freshparking if you want to follow me. Hope ya'll enjoy this nonsensical mess.
> 
> Also I don't edit my shit so I'm sorry if there's any glaring mistakes.

Life did not go on. That was the biggest lie Richie had ever been told about when you lost someone you loved. "Life goes on and you learn to make the most of it."

_He_ didn't go on. Not the way everyone had wanted him to, and he didn’t think the others got it either. How could they? Ben and Bev got their happy ending. Bill had his wife to go home to. Mike had a wide-open future on the road.

So, what did Richie have except for memories that would never leave him? They all said it was a blessing that they could remember Derry this time around, but he thought it was worse than before. They had gained where he had only lost. Would it have been better to just let Eddie be a warm, faceless memory?

Richie spent every day wondering.

And the deadlights. He didn’t ever want to talk about the deadlights. What he had seen swirling around in them. Bev had been right about _that_: they showed you things you wished you had never seen.

Where Bev had seen nothing but death and hopelessness, Richie saw the exact opposite, and somehow that was worse.

He’d seen a vision of Eddie being stabbed in a different way: in Richie’s future, Eddie’s spine was severed. He couldn’t walk…But he would live. He’d live. He’d live and Richie would live him. They made it work with years and years of easy jokes and effortless exchanges. Myra was a hazy bad habit Eddie suddenly had the courage to cut out of his life. Richie took his virginity gently, but without holding back. Eddie had lived too long to not know what it was like being loved like that, and Richie wasn’t interested in letting any more time be wasted.

But then the deadlights abandoned him…The vision abandoned him. And he was left with the reality of what had happened.

Eddie Kaspbrak died and there wasn’t any magical ritual that could bring him back. Richie had asked. He had called Mike up one night, not for the first time, and asked again if during all those years of research if Mike had ever come across anything like that.

“No. I’m sorry, Rich, I’ve told you before…” As always, Mike was gentle. Mike understood, in some small way, what it felt like to lose people. Maybe not the exact same way, but enough that Richie knew the empathy in his voice wasn’t staged.

“Yeah, but,” Richie began, his voice raising in some small hysterical way, “What about-.”

“Richie,” Mike cut off softly, “He’s…He’s gone.”

Richie didn’t remember hanging up. The empire he had made through his comedy had provided him with enough means to be able to hitch up early and lean back into a semi-retired state. He had papers upon papers of investments in stocks laying around and he knew that even if he ran his bank dry, he could work the numbers and cushion his life.

But he didn’t have to. There wasn’t a whole lot Richie needed anymore. Most of his money went into looking for resources anywhere he could find, looking for people who might have ideas. Turned out there were a whole lot of interesting blogs out there of people talking about their own attempts. Half of them seemed like absolute crackheads, and Richie figured out the difference between the genuine and the crazies real fast.

Some people said that there were places you could go to for visions. Richie went to damn near all of them. He smoked whatever people said he had to smoke, drank whatever they said he had to drink, but nothing changed. He found nothing.

The closest he had gotten to was a strange woman with eyes that glowed in the absolute dark of her home. She had held his face between her palms and whispered words he couldn’t recognize, and when she had finished, she had said one simple thing: _He felt the same way._

It had been more of a lead than anything he’d gotten before. She had known, and at first, he had suspected maybe something gave him away in the way he walked or talked or how he had dressed. It was the same kind of paranoia that had ran rampant in him when he was a kid. Figured maybe she was just playing the pronoun game in an abstract sense to make him think she knew.

But then afterwards she had sat down and lit a cigarette, taking a long drag on it.

“Eddie Kaspbrak was more scared of what you could have had than you ever were,” she said, “He didn’t even let himself think about it most days.”  


Richie had sunk into her couch, stupefied. Hearing Eddie’s name out loud never failed to feel like a punch straight to the gut.

She didn’t have much more for him, but she did have phone numbers of other people like her. Richie had thanked her.

Somewhere in Costa Rica, he had gotten a phone call from Beverly.

“Where you now, stranger?” she had asked.

“Costa Rica,” Richie explained, wiping his glasses down from the humidity.

“Richie,” Beverly said, “Honey. Me and Ben were talking. You know…We’d be so happy to have you stay with us for a while.”

“I can’t, Bev,” Richie said distractedly, stepping off the bus and into the hot heat. “I need to do this.”

“Rich…”

“No,” Richie said instantly, “You don’t-. You have Ben. You guys have your-.” He wasn’t mad at Beverly for getting what she had always deserved. What she and Ben had always deserved, but he was mad that no one could see what he was doing. Why he was doing it.  


“I don’t want to stop,” Richie finally said once he put himself back in the right mind, “If I stop…It’s like everything catches up. And I would have given everything for him. I would have spent my whole life with him. So, if I can’t do that then I’m going to spend my whole life looking for him.”

“Richie, he wouldn’t have- I don’t think he would have wanted that.”

“Yeah well,” Richie grumbled lowly, “I didn’t want him to die either, so I guess we’ll both just have to live with disappointing each other.”

He put Beverly’s offer on a back burner. It was in Russia that he finally called Ben up.

“Hey, Rich. How’s Russia?” Ben asked. They all kept in constant touch now. Even if Richie was consumed with this hunt, he still needed his friends, still wanted to know that even if maybe they didn’t understand exactly what he was going through, they understood _enough. _

“Pretty sure I left half my nut sack on the bench just now. It’s fucking frigid.” Today was better than most days. Today Richie was doing what he liked to call Pretending. He had gotten real good at Pretending over his lifetime, keeping his secrets, and now sometimes he liked to keep secrets from himself. Like how Eddie was dead.

“Jesus,” Ben laughed, and Richie knew it was half in relief at just hearing Richie be in a better mood than usual. “When will you be back in the states? We were all thinking of a little reunion.”

“Oh, probably next month. I’m selling my place. Did I tell you?”

“What? No! Congratulations, Richie. Where are you going next?” Ben asked, and he sounded like he really was happy for Richie. They had all been hoping Richie would maybe be able to work on himself a bit better if he just saw new places.

“Not sure,” Richie said, “Eddie likes New York City so maybe there.”

The line went quiet for a few minutes, and eventually, Ben spoke up, “Oh?”

“Yeah. I think he just likes-. You know,” Richie began, “I think I found a nice place for us. This one apartment. I’ll send you the link.”

“That’d be great, Richie,” Ben said, and Richie distantly could tell that Ben had started to cry, but right then, right at that moment, Richie didn’t know why. Sometimes he got so good at Pretending that he forgot.

“But I was thinking,” Richie continued, “That you know. Eddie would probably like your place too. So. If that was still-.”

“Oh yeah,” Ben instantly said, “It’s always open. Our doors are always open to you, Richie.”

“And Eddie,” Richie added just as quickly.

“And Eddie.”

Because at the end of the day, dead or alive, Eddie was still a Loser and all their doors would always be open to him.

But some days the Pretending stopped and when they stopped, it was like losing Eddie all over again. Bill was always the person he called to nights like that. Nights where the whole world felt like a vacuum and Richie could hardly breathe.

Bill would sit with him for as long as he needed. Their record so far had been ten hours. Bill, in some small way, understood. He was always making sure Richie didn’t feel responsible.

“He loved you, Richie,” Bill would say, “That’s why he did what he did. It wasn’t your fault. It’ll never be your fault.”  


“But if I hadn’t been trying to shit-talk that bitch of a-.”

“It wasn’t your fault,” Bill insisted. “It wasn’t. He loved you, got that? He loved you and he was probably the bravest one of us.”

“He was,” Richie agreed quietly.

Some nights all Richie would do was sob. He couldn’t get a hold of himself and Bill would shush him, tell him stories from their childhood where Eddie had done some other dumbass thing, or sometimes he’d just play music and let Richie know he was there.

“I wish I had told him,” Richie confessed one night. “I wish that he had known that even the fucked-up assholes in Derry had never been able to tell me I couldn’t love him. Because I did. I always did. And I wish I had-. If he had known…”

“I know,” Bill said, “But you were brave too, Richie. You might not have told him with your words, but you definitely told him in other ways. So many other ways. There were so many times where I’d look behind to see where you two had gone, and you were right there next to him. I saw you tying his shoes one day-.” Bill had to stop, his own voice choked up and it was one of those moments where Richie knew he had lost his first, true, only love, but Bill had lost one of his best friends too.

“I’m sorry,” he said, and Bill laughed breathlessly, and then they had just cried together. But Richie had slept well that night. Better than usual. He still dreamt of Eddie, but it was one of the better dreams. Long, swaying grass and Eddie just smiling at him, twelve years old and stupid enough to believe there was maybe some hope for them all after all.

The years blur and smudge together. Richie loses something of himself. At one point he did move into Ben and Beverly’s place. It was gorgeous, really, it was. They had the cutest fucking dog too and Richie sometimes would spend literal hours with that dog. Just going on a walk or playing fetch.

He forgot things a lot more easily than the others. He’d wake up randomly in the middle of the night, feeling like he was thirteen years old again, and he’d be confused when he walked into a kitchen and house he didn’t remember.

Ben and Beverly were patient every waking moment of it. Ben had suggested psychiatric help, but it was something they had all silently agreed wasn’t a good idea. There had been too much from Derry and if Richie was honest about even half of it they were afraid he’d get locked up at a ward and never be let out again.

Some nights he would just lay down on the couch with his head in Bev’s lap and she’d stroke his hair for hours, Ben’s arm around Bev and the three of them would watch some dumb movie. Half the time Richie didn’t even remember feeling any of it. He’d tip his head up and see Eddie’s face, and his tears would slide into Bev’s pajama bottoms and she’d silently brush them away.

It never got better.

Every textbook about grief lied. There was no moving on. Maybe there would have been if they had been an ordinary couple with an ordinary life and he had lost Eddie to some tragic, abrupt accident or maybe some rare disease. That’s the kind of loss textbooks write about.

They don’t write about what it felt like to lose the first and only love of your life multiple times. How it felt to lose touch with your best friend and then thirty years later remember how in love with him you’d always been. Then how it felt to have that ripped right on out of your hands.

When the Losers Club finally did have their reunion, there were two extra seats at the table with a rose on each plate setting for the Losers they no longer had. It was a good day for Richie, and he was glad for it. He felt more himself than he had in a long time, animated and lively, and it felt real good. Real good.

“It’s nice to see that you’re doing okay today, Rich,” Mike had said, hugging him tightly. He knew better than to say that Richie was all better. They all knew by now that was a stretch.

“Thanks, Mikey,” Richie said, and he meant it too. It had been years now, and his friends never stopped being patient with him.

Bill had kissed him on the forehead and given him a big ole bear-hug that had Richie wheezing. “Let go of me, you stupid sonna bitch.”

Bill had laughed, and when he left, Richie wished he had told him about the dream he’d had about Eddie. Sometimes he didn’t want to bring it up though. Sometimes it just was too exhausting.

He didn’t remember how old he was anymore. Just knew that whenever he looked in the mirror, he had less hair, more wrinkles, and there was white streaks that hadn’t been there before. The age deepened and Richie began to let go of his mind as the years slid by. He chattered absently to Eddie all the time. Kept a ring on his finger and told anyone that asked that oh yes, he’s been married. Yeah, he’s been married since he was eighteen.

“Married the love of my life,” he’d say, “Never stopped loving him once. Nope.”

He’d talk to Beverly about it occasionally, asking her if she remembered the wedding ceremony and how she had been Richie’s ‘best man’ in a killer lady’s tux. All white. Richie remembered, he swears he did. And Bev got a strange look on her face, and if Richie had been in the right mind, he would have realized it was a genuine look.

“Yeah,” she had said, puzzled, “I…Actually do remember that?”

Beverly went to Ben that night, telling him about the incident.

“The funny thing is Ben…When he said that, I instantly knew what he was talking about. I could see the suit in my mind and everything,” she explained to her husband, her head pillowed on his chest.

“Seriously?” Ben had asked, but there was no real doubt in his voice. After all they had been through?

“Yeah…It was like that time when I had seen Stan die, except…”

“Happy?”

“Yeah, happy. And Eddie,” Beverly said, and the rest of the Losers didn’t mourn Eddie quite the same way that Richie had, but oh. The pain was still there, and it tangled up in the back of her throat and her eyes grew wet. She felt ashamed that it had been if it had since she had last cried for Eddie.

“He looked so happy, Ben.”

Then Beverly blinked.

And she was in the sewers. The world opened wide around her and there was Ben, Ben as his thirteen year old self, looking so scared and alarmed, and everything around her grew loud and pristine and she realized with a sickening rush that it was all a vision. The deadlights had broken her mind wide open, and she saw everything. Everything from death and worse-.

There wasn’t enough time to think about it. Pennywise had been right there, and their band of misfits had to fly into action and crush through it all. They had to fight against Pennywise and then they did, and so they won. They won every single time in the different visions she had seen. This was when they were at their strongest.

When Bill called them a few days later for the promise, she knew that was coming too, but as she sat there, she watched Richie next to Eddie, watched the way that Richie seemed a little self-aware, and she understood.

She understood everything.

When the promises were made and everything was said and done, Bev left her bloodied handprint on Bill’s cheek and went to her bike. She had to find Richie.

She had to fix all of this.

She refused to let her friends die how they do in the future. They were her only family left and she couldn’t afford to lose any of them. Not now, not thirty years from now. She took her bike and sped through town, coasting effortlessly along sidewalks and passing cars that honked furiously after her.

It didn’t take her long to find Richie. He hadn’t made it too far, swooping in wide circles as he rode his bike lazily back home.

“Richie!” she cried out, and he looked over his shoulder in surprise, coming to a brake.

“Oh? What’s this? Let me guess, you’re here to confess your undying love after our batshit showdown?” Richie guessed, grinning toothily. Beverly stopped a few feet from him and dropped her bike onto the pavement. She strode up to Richie and swung her skinny arms around his neck and nearly yanked him off his bike to crush him into a hug.

“Holy shit,” Richie said, stunned, “What-?”

“Richie,” she said, and she had to pinch her eyes shut to keep herself from crying. “You need to tell Eddie.”

“…Uh?” Richie hadn’t hugged her back right away, but he slowly patted an awkward hand against her back. “Tell him what exactly?”

“Richie,” she said again, and she eased back from him, holding him by his shoulders now. “I know it’s scary. I-. Shit. No, that’s not true. I have no fucking clue how scary it has to be for you.”

She liked boys, after all, and her daddy and the whole town might judge her for liking a boy, but she knew that it wasn’t what Richie had to go through. She’d seen the Kissing Bridge. She’d seen some of the graffiti on Eddie’s locker. Pretending like she understood that was naïve. Dumb. Richie wouldn’t pretend to know what it was like to be her, and so she wouldn’t try to pretend to know what it was like to be him.

“I don’t know what you’re talkin’ bout, Bev,” Richie said, but by the waver in his voice, Bev knew that he did. He absolutely did.

“I wasn’t lying when I said I saw all of us years from now,” Beverly said, “And…Eddie.”

Richie grew tense under her hands.

“What about Eddie?” Richie asked tentatively.

“Richie,” Bev said, “You need to tell him. If you tell him now, things work out differently. We don’t lose touch. We-. You guys have this power and if you just…Please, Richie.”

Richie had gone white as a ghost, and Beverly felt a little bad about it. He was far from ready, she knew, but if he didn’t do it now then he’d never do it. She knew that much. It had to be now. Not thirty years from now. Not thirty years after the fact when it was too late and Eddie was bleeding out.

“Do you trust me?” she asked, changing gears. She let go of him and held up her hand, all fingers curled down except for her pinkie.

Richie stared at the pinkie, and then fixed his glasses and slowly reached his own hand up, hooking her pinkie with his own. “Yeah I mean. We just kind of killed a fucking clown together. We’re in it for life, I think, Bev.”

“Then trust me when I say you need to tell him. And Richie…Don’t be afraid, okay? We all love you. He-.”

Except Beverly realized it wasn’t really her place to tell Richie how Eddie felt. Eddie deserved to tell him himself. She smiled instead.

“You already took down one monster, didn’t you? What’s another?”

“Okay, no offense, but Eds is way more scary than that dancing motherfucker,” Richie said, laughing a little breathlessly, and his whole body seemed to shake.

“I know,” Bev said, “But it’s worth it, isn’t it? Eddie’s worth it.”

“….He is,” Richie mumbled eventually. “What do I do. Like-. Just. ‘Hey Eds, you know how I always tell you I wanna bone your mom? Truth is I just wanna bone you’ or something?”

Beverly slid a hand over her face and felt brief pity for Eddie Kaspbrak.

“Richie, you’ll know what to say. Just do what you always do: talk.”

“It is a gift.”

And so it was.

Beverly wasn’t wrong, it turned out. There was a certain magic between Richie and Eddie the same way that there was a certain in magic in how the Losers could hold their hands together and make an immortal promise. Eddie and Richie, Richie and Eddie. Getting the nerves to finally spill his guts to Eddie had been that last showdown that no one even realized needed to be accomplished.

It was the final battle.

The final promise, the final oath.

And at fourteen, Richie had his very first kiss just three feet from where he’d engraved Eddie’s initials with his own, at the time feeling nothing but shame and fear. Now, he held Eddie’s head between his hands and felt like maybe the future wasn’t so scary after all.

They had their entire lives together. And Richie, at fourteen, knew he wasn’t letting that go.

It was enough. It was enough that when Beverly moved to Portland, the Losers still remembered that pretty girl who had breezed so casually and wonderfully into their lives. It was enough that when Ben had to move with his mom, they still remembered the way to the Clubhouse they had built with him. It was enough that Stanley learned to let go of his trauma, piece by piece, and relax into something that almost felt like happiness.

It was enough that they won a lot more that day than just defeating It.

And when It came back thirty years later, the Losers Club was stronger than when It had originally met them. There was nothing that could stop them.

Nothing.


End file.
